Temple University To Cut Baseball After 2014 Season

... will eventually be kicked out of colleges, period. What we're seeing is not just part of an attack on male students by eliminating ways they can feel like they belong in college (after all, the rest of the time, there's an endless stream of propaganda against them coming from "student groups" and the administration), but the bigger picture here is just this: colleges/unis are hardly non-profits and never have been. In order to stay in business, you need to have more money at the end of the day than what you started with. Now if you can handle absorbing losses for some amt. of time, like any business, so that later you will recover and make even more money, this is called either "surviving" or, if you have it planned right, "investing" and winning the bet that it'll pay off. That's what we see these days with "business incubators" and unis buying up hospitals and entire hospital systems. These are not the actions of non-profits. These are the actions of businesses-- ones that get away with not paying the kind of taxes everyone else does.

But for each big uni that can make a killing off their popular sports team(s) or gobbled-up hospital systems, there are tens-to-hundreds more that don't swim with the Big Fish. [Temple has over 27,000 undergrad students, so in this way, what you are seeing here is a bit exceptional; bear in mind, Temple competes with nearby unis like U Penn and Drexel U which have very large endowments and attract students. Despite the substantially higher tuition at U Penn and Drexel (esp. so for in-state Temple students, who pay half as much as out-of-state Temple students), Temple still competes to get students due to differences in perceived prestige and quality of education (not commenting one way or another about the veracity of such perceptions, just that that is what is happening), so their margins are probably not as wide by percentage as those of those other two schools. Plus, the entire Philadelphia area competes with the NYC and Baltimore areas for college students, so not-so-Ivy-League schools in that area are always trying to find ways to get students to decide to go with them. Lowered tuition is one of those ways, even in an age of still-outrageously-high tuition rates.] Consider that these schools increasingly cannot attract students (well, when you charge $150k for a damn-near useless degree, what do you expect?), as the big schools can offer a "richer experience" at usually the same price. So to cut costs, smaller or out-competed schools must eliminate anything not generating revenue. Men's sports are the easiest to go after if such sports are not generating revenue. After all, it's open season on collegiate males. But eventually, the women's teams will get booted as well. There will be objections from feminists, but the college will say "Hey, it's Title IX; we have more female athletes than male ones. What do you want us to do, reinstate those awful rapist-training male athletic teams again?" And so, out will go the women's teams, too. Of course, academic programs not generating enough income for the school will also get put on the block (it's already happening in a lot of places, and by academic programs I mean the kind of ones you generally think of as being collegiate: History, English, Physics, etc.). If the enrollment isn't there, out they go.

Like any product, when it becomes too expensive for people to buy and also too expensive to produce, the market "does not clear", as economists say. Over the next 50 years, look for more colleges to close up shop as people increasingly acknowledge that while a college degree in this or that is nice to have, employers genuinely don't care about anything that doesn't help them make a profit. You need marketable skills to compete. While knowing Chaucer makes you a more "interesting" conversationalist at snooty parties, it does not help your employer come up with more expensive *and* in-demand gadgets to sell to the public, nor does it help them find ways to account their profits and losses in such a way that it favors their taxes payable. THAT is the kind of thing they want, and Chaucer be damned!